In May 1800 a less than crystal clear entry was made in the Gwennap vestry records. The vestry agreed to pay the constables for ‘putting down’ the Cornish Supplementary Militia. The militia was made up of part-time soldiers and had been re-introduced in the 1750s. They were greatly expanded in 1796 during an invasion scare. In Cornwall, when active the militia were usually at this time housed at Penzance in the west and Lostwithiel in mid-Cornwall. The Gwennap entry suggests an extra force was raised and quartered for a time in the parish.
The harvest of 1799 had been a poor one and perhaps the magistrates were taking precautions in case of food rioting, the traditional recourse in the mining districts at times of high prices and scarce supplies. Indeed, in the previous month the overseers had been told by the parish vestry meeting to purchase a stock of ‘100 bushels of barley for the poor’. This anticipated the Parish Relief Act of December 1800 that permitted and encouraged parishes to lay in stocks of food.
In the spring of 1800, the militia proved to be surplus to requirements as no trouble ensued. A year later however things were not so quiet.
In fact, the harvest of 1800 in Cornwall was good, much better than the average further east where a second poor harvest had occurred. Yet the price of corn rose steadily over the winter months of 1800/01. This was because the usual supplies from East Anglia and parts of southern England were not forthcoming. Farmers in those places could sell their produce in markets nearer to hand where the price was higher than in Cornwall and Devon, a state of affairs that persisted until April 1801.
Yet by this time the increase of the mining population in west Cornwall and the wartime boost to the growth of Devonport and Plymouth meant that the district could not be fed solely from the resources of farmers in Cornwall and the south west of England. The continuously rising price of food was reflected in a growing number of people applying for poor relief in Gwennap
Some other parishes started to follow Gwennap’s lead and lay in stocks, Breage for example purchasing grain at the end of October 1800. But this just served to add pressure on supply. Growing talk of impending trouble became more than mere rumour in March 1801 when news of rioting in the towns of Devon provided the spark that lit up Cornish involvement in what one historian called the ‘revolt of the South West’.
Cornish studies resources 